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#Random barbarousness is becoming NYC’s new norm

#Random barbarousness is becoming NYC’s new norm

August 13, 2020 | 8:14pm

Winston Ortiz, an 18-year old Bronx resident, was lured Wednesday into a stairwell by someone he had a dispute with. He was stabbed, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Ortiz died in the hospital Wednesday. Just the latest depravity in an increasingly depraved city.

Each day brings reports of fresh horror. More than 1,000 people have been shot so far this year, which is shaping up to be twice as bloody as 2019. There have been four murders on the subway — usually there are one or two a year — and felony assaults underground are way up, even as ridership is way down.

Random barbarousness is our new normal.

The streets have become filthy, as growing numbers of vagrants inhabit empty doorways. Open-air drug sales and shooting galleries — the sort of thing Gotham hadn’t seen in decades — are common sights.

What happened that caused the mainspring of public order and safety to break and unwind so quickly? Mayor de Blasio likes to wave his hands in the air and talk about deep-seated economic inequality, or anger over the death of George Floyd, or a slowdown in the court system. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to think that people are scrabbling for loaves of bread for their hungry children à la “Les Misérables.”

But none of these crimes — zero — can be connected to inequality or the need for anything except maybe vengeance, prestige or the satisfaction of a psychotic itch. When a man punches someone eating dinner outside, without even a hint of incitement or the possibility of a misunderstood insult, what’s the societal root cause we can blame on “Reaganomics,” as de Blasio does reflexively?

nyc crime
The Bronx crime scene where Winston Ortiz, 18, was stabbed then set ablaze.Robert Miller

Authority has clearly retreated. The streets belong to whoever feels empowered enough to assert himself as the strongman of the moment. This has been a long time coming and dates to the first month of de Blasio’s mayoralty, when he dropped the city’s appeal of Judge Shira Scheindlin’s flawed judgment against New York’s stop-question-frisk policy. Things didn’t come undone all at once; they never do. But the first dominoes in a chain of disaster were flicked over in January 2014.

Since then, the city has meticulously untied all the knots that hold the forces of chaos at bay. Progressives decriminalized quality-of-life offenses, including public urination and smoking marijuana. They valorized arrest-resisters and signaled to criminals that it’s OK to tell the police to leave you alone when they are legally arresting you.

The same crowd diverted illegal-gun cases to alternatives-to-incarceration programs and passed a slate of bail “reforms” that make it impossible to hold people arrested even for serious crimes. They emptied out the jails and prisons and have the gall to tell us that has had nothing to do with the rise in shootings, even though most of those shootings haven’t been cleared yet.

Advocates for criminals love to claim that they are dedicated to evidence-based social science. So, since we haven’t yet figured out how recently the criminals who are shooting people were last in jail, the advocates claim there’s no “data-driven” basis to blame it on bail reform.

It’s true that correlation doesn’t imply causation — but it sure does imply correlation.

Our leaders have also told cops that if in the course of arresting someone they apply pressure to their back, they will face harsh discipline, including the possibility of jail time. People were furious about reports that cops sat back and watched a mob of girls in Harlem beat up another girl on Sunday night. But in the current climate, what were the officers supposed to do — wade in and start tearing apart a gang of violent teens?

The last time that happened, in October 2019, the cops tried to break up a melee on a Brooklyn subway platform and were attacked by the pugnacious youths. Ever tried to break up a fight? It doesn’t look pretty, and when captured on video, it gives the anti-cop crowd more fodder for their campaign against supposed police brutality.

The cops are in a double bind, which is ­exactly where the #DefundtheNYPD people want them. We are facing a dedicated force of anarchists who literally believe that New York City is a fascist police state. For some reason, the political class is afraid of these ­lunatics. The silent majority of non-lunatic New Yorkers needs to speak up and demand that our streets be made safe and livable again.

Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal. Twitter: @SethBarronNYC

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